tell us how they have locked horns over this? >> guest: so this has to be one of the oldest debates in thinking about history or social science, the debate that predates the idea that there is such a thing as social science but if you go back to plato or marks, the idea that social forces are what explain human outcomes. the people were there. we are just different people and they died of a heart attack and replaced by someone else. what happened is something that really mattered would have ended up the same. in the essay which is in theory about napoleon he barely mentioned napoleon. it's all about the social force and so this essentially is to quote samuels from an ip has become history without proper nouns. no people involved. on the other hand carlisle makes the most extreme opposite position and he says history is nothing but the biographies of great men. so it seek easily characters at the great man in history. these are two fundamentally incompatible viewpoints. you can get further apart in your view of the world in these